Reimagining Capacity Building: Navigating Culture, Systems & Power

With racial equity becoming more and more central to the work of grantmakers, in this guide GEO explores how considerations related to racial equity can apply to the full range of grantmakers' capacity-building efforts — everything from financial management to human resources to leadership development. Advancing racial equity in philanthropy, of course, calls for a systemic response that extends beyond capacity-building practices. At the same time, given the prevalence and importance of capacity-building initiatives within the GEO community, it behooves us to take a specific and critical look at how we can make the practice of capacity building more racially equitable — and ideally apply these principles more broadly to our work within the sector. Of note, this guide does not focus on equally important and related efforts on racial equity capacity building — in other words, the training and activities organizations participate in to deepen their understanding of racial equity itself